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What
is Poverty
by
Jo Goodwin Parker (1971)
The
following selection was published in America's Other Children:
Public Schools Outside Suburbs, by George Henderson in 1971
by the University of Oklahoma Press. The author has requested
that no biographical information about her be distributed.
The essay is a personal account, addressed directly to the
reader, about living in poverty.
You ask me what is poverty? Listen to me. Here I am, dirty,
smelly, and with no "proper" underwear on and with
the stench of my rotting teeth near you. I will tell you.
Listen to me. Listen without pity. I cannot use your pity.
Listen with understanding. Put yourself in my dirty, worn
out, ill-fitting shoes, and hear me.
Poverty
is getting up every morning from a dirt- and illness-stained
mattress. The sheets have long since been used for diapers.
Poverty is living in a smell that never leaves. This is a
smell of urine, sour milk, and spoiling food sometimes joined
with the strong smell of long-cooked onions. Onions are cheap.
If you have smelled this smell, you did not know how it came.
It is the smell of the outdoor privy. It is the smell of young
children who cannot walk the long dark way in the night. It
is the smell of the mattresses where years of "accidents"
have happened. It is the smell of the milk which has gone
sour because the refrigerator long has not worked, and it
costs money to get it fixed. It is the smell of rotting garbage.
I could bury it, but where is the shovel? Shovels cost money.
Poverty
is being tired. I have always been tired. They told me at
the hospital when the last baby came that I had chronic anemia
caused from poor diet, a bad case of worms, and that I needed
a corrective operation. I listened politely - the poor are
always polite. The poor always listen. They don't say that
there is no money for iron pills, or better food, or worm
medicine. The idea of an operation is frightening and costs
so much that, if I had dared, I would have laughed. Who takes
care of my children? Recovery from an operation takes a long
time. I have three children. When I left them with "Granny"
the last time I had a job, I came home to find the baby covered
with fly specks, and a diaper that had not been changed since
I left. When the dried diaper came off, bits of my baby's
flesh came with it. My other child was playing with a sharp
bit of broken glass, and my oldest was playing alone at the
edge of a lake. I made twenty-two dollars a week, and a good
nursery school costs twenty dollars a week for three children.
I quit my job.
Poverty
is dirt. You can say in your clean clothes coming from your
clean house, "Anybody can be clean." Let me explain
about housekeeping with no money. For breakfast I give my
children grits with no oleo or cornbread without eggs and
oleo. This does not use up many dishes. What dishes there
are, I wash in cold water and with no soap. Even the cheapest
soap has to be saved for the baby's diapers. Look at my hands,
so cracked and red. Once I saved for two months to buy a jar
of Vaseline for my hands and the baby's diaper rash. When
I had saved enough, I went to buy it and the price had gone
up two cents. The baby and I suffered on. I have to decide
every day if I can bear to put my cracked sore hands into
the cold water and strong soap. But you ask, why not hot water?
Fuel costs money. If you have a wood fire it costs money.
If you burn electricity, it costs money. Hot water is a luxury.
I do not have luxuries. I know you will be surprised when
I tell you how young I am. I look so much older. My back has
been bent over the wash tubs every day for so long, I cannot
remember when I ever did anything else. Every night I wash
every stitch my school age child has on and just hope her
clothes will be dry by morning.
Poverty
is staying up all night on' cold nights to watch the fire
knowing one spark on the newspaper covering the walls means
your sleeping child dies in flames. In summer poverty is watching
gnats and flies devour your baby's tears when he cries. The
screens are torn and you pay so little rent you know they
will never be fixed. Poverty means insects in your food, in
your nose, in your eyes, and crawling over you when you sleep.
Poverty is hoping it never rains because diapers won't dry
when it rains and soon you are using newspapers. Poverty is
seeing your children forever with runny noses. Paper handkerchiefs
cost money and all your rags you need for other things. Even
more costly are antihistamines. Poverty is cooking without
food and cleaning without soap.
Poverty
is asking for help. Have you ever had to ask for help, knowing
6 your children will suffer unless you get it? Think about
asking for a loan from a relative, if this is the only way
you can imagine asking for help. I will tell you how it feels.
You find out where the office is that you are supposed to
visit. You circle that block four or five times. Thinking
of your children, you go in. Everyone is very busy. Finally,
someone comes out and you tell her that you need help. That
never is the person you need to see. You go see another person,
and after spilling the whole shame of your poverty all over
the desk between you, you find that this isn't the right office
after all-you must repeat the whole process, and it never
is any easier at the next place.
You
have asked for help, and after all it has a cost. You are
again told to wait. You are told why, but you don't really
hear because of the red cloud of shame and the rising cloud
of despair.
Poverty
is remembering. It is remembering quitting school in junior
high because "nice" children had been so cruel about
my clothes and my smell. The attendance officer came. My mother
told him I was pregnant. I wasn't, but she thought that I
could get a job and help out. I had jobs off and on, but never
long enough to learn anything. Mostly I remember being married.
I was so young then. I am still young. For a time, we had
all the things you have. There was a little house in another
town, with hot water and everything. Then my husband lost
his job. There was unemployment insurance for a while and
what few jobs I could get. Soon, all our nice things were
repossessed and we moved back here. I was pregnant then. This
house didn't look so bad when we first moved in. Every week
it gets worse. Nothing is ever fixed. We now had no money.
There were a few odd jobs for my husband, but everything went
for food then, as it does now. I don't know how we lived through
three years and three babies, but we did. I'll tell you something,
after the last baby I destroyed my marriage. It had been a
good one, but could you keep on bringing children in this
dirt? Did you ever think how much it costs for any kind of
birth control? I knew my husband was leaving the day he left,
but there were no goodbye between us. I hope he has been able
to climb out of this mess somewhere. He never could hope with
us to drag him down.
That's
when I asked for help. When I got it, you know how much it
was? It was, and is, seventy-eight dollars a month for the
four of us; that is all I ever can get. Now you know why there
is no soap, no needles and thread, no hot water, no aspirin,
no worm medicine, no hand cream, no shampoo. None of these
things forever and ever and ever. So that you can see clearly,
I pay twenty dollars a month rent, and most of the rest goes
for food. For grits and cornmeal, and rice and milk and beans.
I try my best to use only the minimum electricity. If I use
more, there is that much less for food.
Poverty
is looking into a black future. Your children won't play with
my boys. They will turn to other boys who steal to get what
they want. I can already see them behind the bars of their
prison instead of behind the bars of my poverty. Or they will
turn to the freedom of alcohol or drugs, and find themselves
enslaved. And my daughter? At best, there is for her a life
like mine.
But
you say to me, there are schools. Yes, there are schools.
My children have no extra books, no magazines, no extra pencils,
or crayons, or paper and most important of all, they do not
have health. They have worms, they have infections, they have
pink-eye all summer. They do not sleep well on the floor,
or with me in my one bed. They do not suffer from hunger,
my seventy-eight dollars keeps us alive, but they do suffer
from malnutrition. Oh yes, I do remember what I was taught
about health in school. It doesn't do much good.
In
some places there is a surplus commodities program. Not here.
The country said it cost too much. There is a school lunch
program. But I have two children who will already be damaged
by the time they get to school.
But,
you say to me, there are health clinics. Yes, there are health
clinics and they are in the towns. I live out here eight miles
from town. I can walk that far (even if it is sixteen miles
both ways), but can my little children? My neighbor will take
me when he goes; but he expects to get paid, one way or another.
I bet you know my neighbor. He is that large man who spends
his time at the gas station, the barbershop, and the corner
store complaining about the government spending money on the
immoral mothers of illegitimate children.
Poverty
is an acid that drips on pride until all pride is worn away.
Poverty is a chisel that chips on honor until honor is worn
away. Some of you say that you would do something in my situation,
and maybe you would, for the first week or the first month,
but for year after year after year?
Even
the poor can dream. A dream of a time when there is money.
Money for the right kinds of food, for worm medicine, for
iron pills, for toothbrushes, for hand cream, for a hammer
and nails and a bit of screening, for a shovel, for a bit
of paint, for some sheeting, for needles and thread. Money
to pay in money for a trip to town. And, oh, money for hot
water and money for soap. A dream of when asking for help
does not eat away the last bit of pride. When the office you
visit is as nice as the offices of other governmental agencies,
when there are enough workers to help you quickly, when workers
do not quit in defeat and despair. When you have to tell your
story to only one person, and that person can send you for
other help and you don't have to prove your poverty over and
over and over again.
I
have come out of my despair to tell you this. Remember I did
not come from another place or another time. Others like me
are all around you. Look at us with an angry heart, anger
that will help
Has
anything Changed?
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